“The ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on”: Specters of Servitude in Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe House of the Seven Gables

Abstract

In his remarks on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, D.H. Lawrence quips, "No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner" (104). Lawrence's implication that the ghosts of the Pyncheons' ancestral estate would be antedated by household appliances explicitly connects the performance of domestic labor with supernatural hauntings. This association between domestic labor and the novel's spectral presences is later echoed in Gillian Brown's seminal work, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), which argues that, "[w]hat haunts the House of the Seven Gables" are "not only the sins of the fathers but also the disembodiments of the present, the ghosts of feminine labor" (81). While Brown's intriguing study draws attention to Hawthorne's use of domestic ideologies, no scholar has yet analyzed the portrayal of domestic servants in The House of the Seven Gables. Domestic servants haunt the periphery of the novel, and Hawthorne's romance is mired in contemporary anxieties about the so-called "servant problem." The narrative thus participates in the cultural work of domestic literature by engaging with nineteenth-century anxieties regarding the ambiguous social status of domestic servants and their employers within a democratic but slave-owning nation. Ultimately, Hawthorne exposes the oppressive nature of domestic work by connecting servants to the spectral in The House of the Seven Gables-, however, his critique is limited by his prejudices as a middleclass employer. Thus, while acknowledging the servant problem, The House of the Seven Gables also reflects frustration at the proposed methods to correct what employers saw as a flawed system that failed to provide them with competent, complaisant domestics. Amy Schrager Lang identifies the eponymous estate of Hawthorne's romance as "the locus of a conflict between wealth and poverty, prominence and obscurity, that unresolved and apparently unresolvable, binds generation after generation of Pyncheons and Maules to one another" (33). While Lang's analysis focuses primarily on the conflict between middle-class domesticity and the "new social order" of the capitalist "laboring man," this essay will focus on the conflict that occurred within the home itself--the nineteenth-century skirmish between the serving and the served (33). After an introduction to the reoccurring image of the ghostly servant in the fiction, I will explore the racial and class anxieties of the "servant problem," which Hawthorne saw in his own personal and domestic life and which are interwoven in the narrative of The House of the Seven Gables. My analysis also draws on cultural historians' accounts of domestic service, as well as on nineteenth-century domestic service manuals, which I posit are texts that should not be considered merely as repositories of cultural practices as they were typically performed, but rather as useful records of a culture's domestic ideologies and aspirations. (1) While these manuals proffer possible solutions to the servant problem, their potential strategies for overcoming employer/servant tensions are, we will see, ultimately undercut by the novel's pessimism. Hawthorne exposes the oppressed ghosts of servant and slave laborers haunting American domestic spaces, but offers no possibility of a national exorcism. The haunting of the Pyncheon house by the unrecognized labor of the family's domestic servants is made manifestly clear in the novel when Phoebe, in Chapter VII, begins to make a simple Indian corn cake. The narrator speculates, Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. (2:99) Despite his facetious tone, the narrator's description of the "ghosts of departed cook-maids" contains hints of smoky, unpleasant working conditions and difficult culinary preparations, a troubled domesticity much different from the idealized housewifery performed by Phoebe. …